Shallow subsurface structures and geotechnical characteristics of Tal El-Amarna area, middle Egypt

The shallow seismic refraction profiling was carried out at 18 sites in Tal El-Amarna, which is a flat area on the eastern bank of the Nile River, 50 km south of El Minia Governorate, middle Egypt. The collected data are used to estimate the P-wave velocity and to delineate the near-surface ground model beneath the study area. This study is supported by the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics due to the historical interest of the Tal El-Amarna area as a famous tourist place where there exist many Pharaoh temples and tombs. This area is low seismically active, but it is probably of high vulnerability due to the influence of the local geological conditions on earthquake ground motion, as well as the presence of poor constructions in the absence of various issues such as building designs, quality of building materials, etc.Another dataset at the study area is obtained by multi-channel passive source (microtremor) measurements, which have been recorded at four arrays. The frequency–wavenumber (f–k) method was used to derive the dispersion curves from the raw signals at each array. The resulted dispersion curves were inverted using the neighborhood algorithm to obtain the shear and P-wave velocity models.The concluded Vs and Vp values provide a preliminary estimation of the geotechnical parameters and site classification for the shallow soil as they are of great interest in civil engineering applications.